Free Fullalove by Gordon Burn

placard-carriers who or what they are demonstrating for or against. There is no ‘Oggi-Oggi-Oggi’. No ‘What do we want! – Peace! When do we want it! – Now!’ No clown-painted children in pushchairs, no electric hailers. Just the dogged shuffle-tramp, and the slogans and daubings that I dutifully write down in the hope that they might arrange themselves into some narrative shape later.
    ‘Health, beauty, morality’
    ‘Stain, defilement, disorder’
    ‘We live in the ecstasy of communication, and this ecstasy is obscene’
    ‘I want to care but it’s so hard’
    ‘Upland fields, hilly roads, noble horses’
    ‘Fame, packaging, standardisation, vacuity, death’
    ‘The mouth kisses, the mouth spits – nobody mistakes the saliva of the first for the second’
    ‘More imprisoned, lost and alienated than ever before’
    ‘Unnerving in their absoluteness, their remoteness’
    ‘These creatures of the electric limbo’
    ‘BB9’
    Heath Hawkins has his flashgun hooked up to the power-pack on his belt; he’s ready to rumble. ‘Okay. Let’s blind the fuckers. Shish their fuckin’ eyeballs, man,’ he says.
    Leaving by way of a side-street adjacent to the west wing of St Saviour’s, I see the camera emplacements at an upper window, the fisheye and periscope and telephoto lenses trained on the magenta reflecting window of McGovern’s room. The family of four who usually live there have been moved into the Regent Palace Hotel until the doctors pull the plugs.
    ‘TV star Scott McGovern, who suffered massive brain damage after an attack at his home, died in hospital last night. Doctors switched off the 54-year-old stricken celebrity’s life-support machine after his family said a poignant farewell.’ The story is stroked into the system, slugged strickceleb for easy retrieval, ready to go.

Chapter Two
    There was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. He was fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen. On Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in the top of the Boy’s stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws, the effect was charming.
    My bed looks as though it has been pissed in, and the piss has soaked up the sheets into the pillow, turning it a dirty urine yellow. It hasn’t (at least not lately). The yellowing comes from the liquid inhalant I dose the pillow with at night and whose piney menthol vapours do what little they can to stop my furred tubes and pumps and passages packing up on me completely while I’m sleeping.
    ‘Karvol’ to see me off; Meryl Streep to bring me round again. I jam Streep’s Talkingbook version of The Velveteen Rabbit over my ears as soon as I am half-awake, to lull me into consciousness.
    If I associate this reading of the old nursery story with happy landings, it is because the first time I heard it was 30,000 feet over the Atlantic, in the middle of one of those electric storms that has the cabin staff shooting pop-eyed, fixed-grin glances at one another for reassurance and passengers gasping audibly every time the plane pitches or plummets three hundred feet through a hole in the turbulence, up-ending sneaky movie-time Scotches and Virgin Marys. I was sitting next to a grey-haired granny, travelling alone, up in a plane for the first time, and being barmily unafraid about the fact that the sardine can in which we were strapped, helpless, was being jiggled about the sky like a coin in God’s dark pocket.
    I clamped on the headset and started whipping through the channels in search of comfort, help, distraction. I passed on the Chopin preludes, Horovitz in Moscow, Carl Sagan revealing the secrets of the cosmos, Dwight Yoakum, David Hamilton’s Chataround and P.M. Dawn, stopping when I heard Streep’s cod English-governess accent telling the tale of the velveteen rabbit against a light string-quartet and flute backing. The archaisms